Techno-economic analysis of EPON and WiMAX for future Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) networks

Hybrid Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) networks become rapidly mature and represent a promising candidate for reducing power consumption, costs, and bandwidth bottlenecks of next-generation broadband access networks. Two key FiWi technologies with similar design goals are Ethernet Passive Optical Network (EPON) and WiMAX. In this paper, we develop a powerful and flexible techno-economic analysis to compare the two technologies, taking into account not only equipment and installation costs but also OAM related costs such as power consumption and repairing costs for a wide range of different network failure scenarios, terrain types, and wireless channel conditions. The presented results give insight into the cost-performance trade-offs of current and next-generation EPON and WiMAX networks.